In another way, however, "Ixchel" is a woman grown. She knows the secret of sex, which to her is both "no big deal" and the great difference of her life. She identifies with all women and speaks to her curious little cousins in Mexico as if they were inhabitants of another world, light-years away from hers. She has been different from other girls all along, which is why she did not want to lose her virginity in an alley or some car; now she is, ironically, both different from other women and the same as all women, for she has accepted the mythical truth given her by her lover — and she knows that "life will always be hard."
"Ixchel's" very traditional upbringing may have contributed to her childlike simplicity, but her simplicity in turn is probably what has allowed her to be content with that upbringing. She has no difficulty accepting what Boy Baby says as the truth — even after she has learned that in an ordinary sense it is not true at all. This acceptance of two "truths" at once seems to be related to her acceptance of her lover's unconventional approach to time, according to which past and future and present are all in some way the same thing. She accepts these things without understanding them, nor does she feel any need to understand them on an intellectual level. This may be what protected her from Boy Baby, for if he is rightly accused of multiple killings, he certainly had every opportunity to kill "Ixchel" when she went with him to his apartment, when he wept and showed her an entire arsenal of guns and knives. Perhaps he recognized her as an inhabitant of a mythical world. And, indeed, the world she inhabits is one that rejects logic. Her world is one of love, which she sees not as romance nor as sexual pleasure but instead as a kind of atmosphere within which she exists, breathing it in and out like the man (significantly, a "crazy") who went around always with a harmonica in his mouth, making a kind of monotonous music with his breath.
